I hated the above Avatar movie but I loved TLoK. She is such an awesome character and has tonnes of growth and development, along with the fantastic lgbt end of the series. It was definitely a little difficult in the first few episodes but a big part of that was the transition from a rural setting to a city setting decades later, so it went from the backwater technology level to the cutting edge near a century later.

My personal recommendation is to get started asap with what you have. That would mean using any old thing you have laying around. Do you have an old laptop? They are ideal for beginner self hosting as you can physically access the machine and it includes a battery backup right in the machine. Usually they are also fairly lower efficient, so that is nice too.

Buying dedicated hardware acts as a barrier to actually doing things, so getting past that is key. If you find you don’t actually want to do self hosting you can just stop using your old laptop, but if you bought a full server machine it will be a bit of a trap and make you feel like you failed in some way. Also, the cost right now is fairly prohibitive, but using existing hardware can make that much more manageable.

As for what to run, I would recommend trying a fresh install of a distro based on Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch. Yes, four. They are different and have a different feel to them, but also have different communities. By going through the process of installing each one you will get a feel for the system and the community around it and have a better idea what works for you. I spent a few years having around the Debian end of things but eventually moved over to Arch stuff and am currently using EndeavourOS. Your experience will likely be different to mine but trying a few different options will help you figure it out.

Then moving on to services. Try to see what you actually use your machine to do now and then find services for that. For example, if you use something like Google Drive to synchronise data from your phone to your desktop then try using Syncthing to replace that. If you use Netflix to watch stuff try using Jellyfin. If you do play things like Minecraft get a local server running.

These will all be for learning, so their performance doesn’t need to be better than what a professional can provide, they just need to work and be yours to learn with. If you find you love doing this and enjoy the process but the hardware is holding you back this is a good time to upgrade to a dedicated machine.

For this I would recommend getting an office computer like an Optiplex or similar, just a basic office computer with an i5 or similar. You will want a fairly good amount of RAM in it, probably 16GB minimum and really 32GB is where things start getting good. A dedicated graphics card is not likely to be useful this early as the iGPU in most modern processors is actually fairly robust and should handle transcoding video for most use cases at a small scale. Storage could be one SSD for the OS and multiple spinning disk drives in a RAID or similar configuration for storage. The SSD will make the actual OS faster, decrease boot times, and make it faster to install and update things making updates less disruptive. The spinning media is way cheaper and you can backup all of your OS drive onto the spinning disks as a cron job in low usage times.

That’s my two cents on it, start with what you have, expand as you need but not aggressively before you need it, and try things now before you are too afraid to mess something up because you rely on it. Remember to have fun and experiment, nothing teaches better than experience. Enjoy yourself, don’t take it too seriously, and don’t lock yourself in to one specific thing, be flexible and willing to experiment.

Think about what people who don’t have to work now do and apply it, or alternatively think about what people do in their down time.

My partner paints and does various other types of art. They are disabled and we live in Australia so they have a support payment, meaning they don’t have to work for money. They have made some awesome art that I really love and they do it because they want to. There is no time pressure, not external motivation, it is purely intrinsic motivation that drives their behaviour.

I on the other hand have done a bunch of different jobs in which I have made things like in IT where I put together servers and replaced aging infrastructure. The stress of the external time pressures and so on took away a good fraction of the joy of it. In my home lab I have some cool things I have played around with and I genuinely enjoy them, but that is my own stuff with my own money and time, so the joy is there in full.

If I were considering how things would happen in a solar punk future it would not be jobs, it would not be something you are incentivised to do, it would be something you do because you want to, so hours would likely be less and you would likely have multiple fairly different things. I personally would probably cook, garden, care for kids and disabled people, do cool stuff with computers, and learn about genetic engineering and associated cool science stuff. None of those would be 40+ hours a week, but I would have periods of getting stuck into a project and spending a lot of time for a couple of weeks on one thing while reducing the time for the rest.

This all rides on automation taking care of most of the labour requiring tasks. I would still cook because I enjoy it, even though a machine could do it just as well with no effort from me. I would learn about things out of interest, not utility.

When you get it wrong, which you will, just correct and move on. Make a separate acknowledgement that you will make mistakes but your intention is to get it right. Make those two separate things, don’t make the moment of you getting it wrong the time you affirm your intent, keep them separated and they will both be more effective.

Also, ask them if they would like to go clothes shopping, in person or online, and support them in trying things that they have not yet been comfortable trying.

Being supportive isn’t about perfection. It is about effort. Your effort shows your care and consideration which in turn show your love and regard. Be there, be involved as is wanted, and be willing to accept making a mistake as you learn together. That is worth more than any amount of perfection that cannot be provided. Remember, the effort is the display of love, messing it up is something that happens along the way, keep trying and things will work out.